


Two seconds: extremely short or inordinately long

by RABunzai



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU, F/M, Russian Mythology, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 06:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4615605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RABunzai/pseuds/RABunzai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt: Two seconds. That's all. Natasha can only see two seconds into the future - but she's learned to make it count.<br/>Got a bit mystical AUish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two seconds: extremely short or inordinately long

**Author's Note:**

> So I may have been lurking at the Be_Compromised promptathon and then saw the prompt from Sweetwatersong: Two seconds. That's all. Natasha can only see two seconds into the future - but she's learned to make it count.  
> Warnings about some violent imagery. I tried to post the fill in the lj but it totally thinks I'm spam. It's probably not wrong.

It starts when she is little, in the middle of a Russian winter with the sound of ice cracking beneath her feet.

The girl in front of her slips below the lake’s icy veil, her hands reaching out for Natalia, eyes begging…

Natalia lunges, small fingers closing like a vice over Lucya’s gloved hand. She pulls back hard but the ground around her shifts with the weight of the sudden movement. There is a rush of sound, a stuttered breath and the feeling of falling before the Russian winter offers two little girls to the water.

The cold is overwhelming; it burns where it touches her and it touches her everywhere, inside and out. The water invades her small body, filling up every part of her and it’s just too much. Natalia is little but she is strong and yet she can’t seem to push the weight of the water off her limbs.

In the darkness, behind closed eyes, she sees a woman glide through the blue to float by her side.

“Mother?” Natalia asks. She had always hoped to see her mother when she died.

The old crone laughs, a bottomless sound that causes the rest of her bones to rattle in rhythm.

“No little girl there are no mothers here, only dead things in this water,” says Baba Yaga. She draws a boney finger across Natalia’s cheek and the touch chases the heaviness away, just for a moment.

“Lucya…” Natalia gasps; looking for the girl she’d tried to save. She struggles to move but the water has bound her tight and won’t let her go.

“She’s gone my little Natalia. There are only dead things in the water.” Baba Yaga does not sound sorry.

 

_No_ , Natalia thinks. _They were told to survive._

The Red Room had walked them through the snow for days, a parade of pretty dolls in lines of two by two. On the fifth day they handed her a knife and Lucya some bread and left them under a birch tree covered in ice crystals.

_Survive_ , they said, _only the strong survive._

 

“The water doesn’t want you Natalia, so tell me, tell me what _you_ want?” Baba Yaga asks, her voice is quiet but kind and Natalia chokes on it.

What does she want? She wants to be home with a mother and father, she wants touches that don’t leave bruises, words that don’t cut like knives, she wants warmth and love and things that don’t exist.

“Love is for children Natalia, there are no children in the water, only dead things. What do you _want_?”

She doesn’t want to be a dead thing. She wants out of the water, out of the darkness.

“Tell me,” Baba Yaga coos.

“I want to survive.” Natalia coughs against the water in her lungs. “I want to survive!”

 

Baba Yaga cackles, loud and brash.

“I’ll give you a gift Natalia.” The crone’s fingers trail Natalia’s brow, her cheek, her neck and where she touches becomes warm and weightless. “I’ll give you a gift little Natalia because the water does not want you yet.”

Baba Yaga’s hands chase the cold away, lift the weight of the water off her body till Natalia is strong again and she can push it away herself. When it’s all gone and she is dry, Natalia opens her eyes.

She is back on the frozen lake watching Lucya tread ahead of her, left boot descending on fractured ice. Lucya screams and reaches out to Natalia, her eyes begging… and Natalia keeps her hands by her sides and her own eyes open as Lucya slips below.

 

….

 

She does not tell anyone about the gift. Like the water it was born in, its rules are not fixed. It comes when she needs it, warns her with a rush of cold across her skin and gives her the precious seconds she needs to survive.

As a child of the Red Room, it serves her well. Two seconds before a fatal blow to the head and it gives her time to block. Two seconds before a bullet catches her brow and she ducks. Two seconds before the charge ignites and she pulls the red wire instead of blue.

Her gift is her secret and the Red Room has taught her that secrets are weapons too. She adds it to her arsenal and she survives.

 

…..

 

Limping through a warehouse in Vladivostok she leans with her back against the door to push it open; her hands burned and cradled to her chest. The gift means she survives but not always intact. Her head swims as she steps into the alley; the cool air does nothing to dull the effects of fire on her palms.

She does not expect to feel the now familiar cold when it creeps across her skin but she doesn’t fear it when it comes.

She enters the in-between where she takes her next step and feels the arrow embed itself neatly in her heart. She gets the last second to look at him. There is a sadness in his eyes that’s honest and she thinks it would be nice to die with something honest to hold onto.

Two seconds can be an extremely short or inordinately long amount of time. Inordinately long when she is tired of surviving. The last few months have felt like a Russian winter, like slowly wading into ice water, letting it seep into her clothes, into her skin and bones and pull her under one step at a time.

She takes half a step forward, longing to submerge herself…but she can’t. _I want to survive_ , little Natalia had yelled. And Natasha still does. The Red Room had sent two little girls into the wilderness to survive and only one had come back. Some lessons can’t be unlearned. Some choices must be honored.

She doesn’t take the step, holds her head above the water and looks for him as the arrow passes by her breast. His eyes are shocked and confused but still so very honest.

 

….

 

Months later he flings a napkin at her head, laughs as it bounces off her shoulder and onto the empty tray.

“You missed,” she teases, picking it up and striding away to drop it in the trashcan with her own. He watches her move with a fondness that she wishes he could disguise but his eyes are incapable of lies. When she walks back to take her seat he shuffles closer and his boot taps hers under the table.

“I don’t miss unless I want to.” He grins and wiggles his empty fingers, as if not walking the extra seven paces to the trashcan was some kind of victory.

“Vladivostok,” she reminds him and blinks when he shakes his head.

“I don’t miss unless I want to.” He says it with force, with the confidence of a man who doesn’t know he’s wrong. “When I looked at you… you were tired Tasha. But you were fighting so hard to survive… I couldn’t. I can’t and I won’t.”

The emotion in his words feels like an arrow through the chest. She won’t tell him the truth of it.

 

……

 

Her gift is like water, its rules are not fixed but its consistency is. It comes when she needs it and she survives. Until it changes. 

They are safe because they are in his apartment. His body is warm against her side and she’s flipping through the channels of his television, pretending to ignore his protests whilst she taunts him with various foreign news networks. When his whining becomes unbearable she settles for the show he likes about anthropomorphized dogs that fight crime.

They are safe in his apartment so it’s a shock when the cold sets in. His fingers are hot against her skin, turning her chin gently until she meets his eyes. They are full of things that don’t exist, gentle touches and kind words, warmth and love and he’s still so damn honest it hurts her to look. His lips descend on hers and her heart aches, but for what she can’t say.

Two seconds is an extremely short or inordinately long amount of time.

She closes her eyes so she can’t see his. She turns her head and his lips graze the corner of her mouth.

He pulls away muttering an apology, excuses himself to the kitchen under the pretense of getting another drink. When he comes back they don’t talk about it. He moves himself to the edge of the couch and takes his warmth with him. She sits in front of his television, not really watching the dog with a badge handcuff a ginger cat for a crime it didn’t commit.

Instead she thinks about survival.

 

…

 

The gift is still hers but its not.

They’re in a firefight in Liepāja, tucked behind the wreckage of their flipped vehicle. He has his bow drawn and arrow ready.

“I’ll cover you,” he says before rising above their metal shield. The cold hits her so suddenly she gasps. The bullet takes him in the temple, his bow falling from his hands as he’s propelled backwards to the pavement.

When time starts again she can still feel the phantom sting of his blood on her face. Two seconds is almost too short when she reaches for him, drags him back as the bullet passes too close.

 

A rooftop in Kiev. A sniper rifle in Warsaw. A falling building in Sibiu.

She begins to fear the cold.

 

They find a young soldier in Catania, shaking with terror and rage, finger twitching on the trigger of the gun he holds to his own head.

“It’s okay,” Clint says, lowering his bow and gently creeping closer. Natasha does not lower her gun. “It’s okay. You’re safe. We’ll keep you safe.”

The archer takes a step forward, holds his hands out wide and vulnerable.

“You’re safe here,” he says and his hand inches for the soldier’s gun.

 

She bites her lip at the cold because she doesn’t want to do this again. The soldier’s eyes are wide with panic and he breaks, turns the gun and fires. She watches her partner’s body hit the floor and asks herself when his survival became her own.

Time comes back and she doesn’t hesitate, simply shoots the young soldier in the head with a precision born from years of practice.

There is blood on Clint’s clothes when he turns to her, jaw clenched tight.

“He was…I was….I was gonna talk him down Nat.”

“He was going to shoot you.” The memory of his body on the floor makes her voice break. He reads that as uncertainty.

“You know that? Is that what you know?”

 

Oh, she does. She knows and this gift is no gift at all.

……

 

It ends where it begins, in the middle of a Russian winter with the sound of cracking ice.

They hang from a bridge over the Ob River. His grip around her wrist is strong but his hold on the cable that suspends them above the ice is slipping.

“I’ve got you Nat,” he says, the words fighting to be heard over the roar of gunfire, burning vehicles and her own thunderous heartbeat. He’s all she has to stop her from plunging to the frosted river below. He won’t let her go.

It’s why she fights back an anguished cry when she feels the chill on her skin that’s not from the wind.

His hand slips from the cable that’s too thick for his fingers to claim enough purchase. Even as they fall he tries to swing her back to safety though it was always going to be too far. Neither can bear to release their hold on the other so he pulls her to him, in a desperate bid to save her or for his own comfort, she can’t tell.

 

Two seconds is an extremely short amount of time. But it’s all she has to say goodbye.

She twists her wrist against his thumb and hears him scream her name. She holds his gaze as she falls, wanting him to see alive in her eyes all the things that don’t exist. She falls and falls, hits the ice and keeps going.

 

……

 

“You came back to me my little Natalia.”

Baba Yaga’s hands are at her face, fingers pressed painfully into her cheeks. Her breath is sickly but warm against Natasha’s lips 

The water burns like it always has but Natasha knows better than to fight it. She uses what remains of her strength to ask a question.

“Why?”

Baba Yaga laughs, raking her fingernails down swollen flesh, leaving marks that sting.

“They sent you to me, year after year, sweet little girls to be dead things in the water. But the water did not want you Natalia. It needed you. So I gave you a gift.”

The witch draws closer and kisses her brow.

“I want you Natalia. But the water says no. It only wants dead things.”

 

She is dead though, isn’t she? Her body feels broken from the fall, the water of the Ob River has filled her lungs, her throat, her nose. She is dead, isn’t she?

Baba Yaga embraces her; limbs cracking as she presses and mends the bones back together. “What do you want Natalia?” she whispers, breath hot against Natasha’s ear.

What does she want?

 

Natasha breathes one word to Baba Yaga.

The old crone gnashes sharp teeth and the water around Natasha rages.

“No my little Natalia, that is a gift I cannot give.” Baba Yaga pulls Natasha’s hand to her breast, resting it against sodden decaying skin. “You’ll have to take it.”

So she does.

 

…

 

Natasha opens her eyes.

“Nat,” he gasps, his fingers on her jaw, thumb on her lips, holding her gently as if she’ll shatter like the surface of the river. There is blood on her hand but its not hers because she is whole again, Baba Yaga had given her that.

She takes a stuttering breath, exhales a ghostly mist into the space between them, evidence of life - his life and hers.

When she kisses him she asks him to chase the cold from her skin. There will be no second chances for them both. She’s done with surviving. Now she wants to die and to die she has to live.

She leaves the gift in the freezing water; it does not find her again.


End file.
